While we are counting down to Tech.Ed I thought I'd mention the Australian Architecture Forum that just wrapped up in Sydney and Melbourne. I was lucky enough to be involved in presenting at the conference this year holding two round tables one on Enterprise Search and the other on “A Portal in to the Business”. I found it thoroughly enjoyable both due to the different format as well as the wide range of experienced attendee's.

Unlike the traditional presentation style sessions I've held at other conferences my AAF sessions were round tables. This meant I deliberately limited the amount I talked and tried to spark some discussion and knowledge sharing between the attendee's.  The end result was that the sessions went in vastly different directions based on the people there and I hope everyone at the table learnt something of use (I know I did !).

One of the reasons I choose the topics I did is because I believe there are great challenges in implementing either Enterprise Search and/or a Portal successfully.  There really are a great range of products out there including SharePoint 2007 but regardless of the product you choose you really have to do some careful planning to avoid common pitfalls. Some of the key things we discussed in both sessions was the importance of tying in with an identity management strategy, security, backup and scalability, training, iterative cycles of implementation and review and emerging technology trends such as mapping, blog, wiki and tagging. It was really exciting to see how many large companies are now starting to implement some of these newer pieces of functionality within their enterprise.

It was also the first vendor neutral event I have presented at with the attendee's spit pretty evenly between both Microsoft and other technology implementers. A lot of the issues we discussed were really technology neutral as the same problems seemed to be found regardless of which product you were using. It was also very interesting to hear how people have solved some of the issues raised with various technology implementations. There was a fair bit of discussion on pro's and con's of various products but I think we successfully avoided a religious war.

Were you at the AAF ?
It will hopefully become a yearly event so if you were there I’d love to know what you thought of the whole event or just parts of it both good and bad.